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Question on 301s

I have a questions on 301 redirects, i hope someone can give me some help on this.

There was some 301 redirects made on some of the URLs at the beginning of the year, however we are now re-structuring the whole website, which means the URLs which had been given a 301 redirect are now getting another 301.

The question is, should i delete the first 301 redirect from the htaccess file?

15 Responses

Yes, it is always a good idea to cut down the number of 301 redirects (or any redirects in general) because if I remember correctly, Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so. You also lose another 10% link juice for each additional redirect.

Lastly, don't forget to 301 redirect the URLs from the beginning of the year to the new re-structured website.

I partially agree with Cafe. However, I wouldn't remove any redirects for URLs which may have backlinks. Maybe it would be a good idea to figure out if any of the redirects which you are removing are from URLs that have earned links? An Open Site Explorer link export would help you figure out if any of those URLs still have value.

I would then add an additional 301 redirect to the secondary page (the old redirect) to the new location.

So you will have your original URL and the older redirected URL both 301 redirected to where the content now resides. This way you only have one hop on the 301 redirects and you have both old URLs pointing to the new one.

The only thing that concerns me is what CafePress had said "Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so."

I have another issue regarding the 301 re-directs:

We have:

/abcd http://www.example.com/abcde this is actually a 301 on a product page, however we have the same product in a shop page /shop/abcd which we have decided to do away with the shop directory, is it best practice to also do a 301 from the /shop/abcd to /abcde?

The only thing that concerns me is what CafePress had said "Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so."

You can offer 100 links on a page. All the links can be to "seomoz.org" and they will all be crawled even though the real URL is "www.seomoz.org" and all 100 links will get redirected.

What CafePress referred to is redirects for a single URL.

www.example.com/a redirects to /ab which redirects to /abc and so forth. A crawler will only follow a single URL so far through a chain of redirects before the PR is completely gone and it stops.

Therefore the preferred solution is to redirect any old or broken URLs to their new URL in a single redirect. I'll share an example based on your site:

Very old URL: example.com/a. It is redirected to example.com/ab

Old URL: example.com/ab. It is redirected to example.com/abc

You could leave these two redirects in place, as-is, and they will work, but it is not recommended. The reason is any traffic to /a will have a double re-direct. First the traffic will go to /ab then to the final destination of /abc. This double redirect is an unnecessary delay, it adds extra points of vulnerability and is a waste of SEO link juice. The preferred solution would be to modify the /a redirect to point to the /abc page directly.

Every URL which is no longer active would require a 301 redirect to the proper page. In the situation you describe:

/a should redirect to /abc

/ab should redirect to /abc

I recognize this seems confusing so forget it's a website for a moment. Think of it as mail after you move.

You lived at 100 Main Street. That is where you received your mail. Now you move to 200 Elm Street. You put in a forward order with the post office (a real world equivalent to a 301 redirect). Now any mail addressed to 100 Main Street will be received at 200 Elm Street.

Now you move again to 300 Wall Street. You would put in another forwarding order so your mail from 200 Elm Street gets delivered to your new address. This solution is fine BUT, your mail from 100 Main Street would be delayed. First it would get forwarded to the 200 Elm Street post office, who would then have to forward it to 300 Wall Street. This process is inefficient (in seo terms, you lose link juice).

You want to change your 100 Main Street forward order to direct your mail to the 300 Wall Street address. Now all of your mail is taken to the proper location in a single hop.

Also, if a page is indexed, which is highly likely (due to XML sitemaps, Google Analytics, Google Toolbar etc), then just removing the 301 redirect (links or no links) means that when this page disappears due to the site changes then you will have an indexed page resulting in a 404 error.

I maintain that you should have single hop 301 redirects on all of the pages that will not be there or will have been moved due to the site updated.

I also agree with what Ryan Kent says about links - you may have some links that have been discovered but not yet recognized pr picked up. If there is a chance that the content has been indexed then it should have an appropriate redirect.

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